Posted
by
timothy
on Monday June 21, 2004 @10:45PM
from the army-of-a-quite-a-bunch-actually dept.

olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'"alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to
CNET's version of the story.

As a six year (Ch)Air Farce errr, force vet, let me 'splain you sumthin' Lucy!

Ok, the A-10 is not operated by Army personnel. A big part of the reasoning by the DOD (not the Air Force) for not selling/transferring the A-10 to the Army in the early 90s was the fact that it would have been highly cost prohibative to train the support personnel, and purchase the proper maint. equip. for the birds, and the weapons systems.

The A-10 is an awesome bird - the only one ever built specifically around a gun. The GAU-8/A 30MM Gatling gun is quite effective at turning the enemy into "pink mist and bone chips" but is a pain in the rear to keep maintained and loaded. This is the primary reason that the Air Force, who had trained, qualified personnel and equipment, as well as bases , etc. kept the A-10. Not because of some 50 year old pissing contest (by the way the only pissing contests I can ever remember were AF/Navy or AF with Army/Dept. Navy because the AF still views the Army as more of a sister service.)

The AF provides ground based combat controllers to Army units (the reason you will occasionally see blue suiters with ranger patches etc.) to do ATC for CAS (close air support) with the Army - but the Army doesn't always have one of these ground controllers handy, so they train their people how to communicate with the pilots of the A-10 and v/v - That is why they are involved in the A-10 Training Simulator.

I suppose a bomb with a rocket attached to it is classified as a missile. I can see it being a possible hypersonic-jet missle. I think one US armed service has something that is hypersonic but it is a rocket and not a jet.

A jet can use air as one fuel component, a rocket has to carry all of its combustibles. Anyhow, at these speeds, one doesn't need explosives, the kinetic energy from such a hypersonic jet-missle is enough to cause plenty of damage.

And the reason for this is because the mass is traveling faster than the wavefront of the explosion would. Seriously an explosive would only disrupt the kinetics. There was a call for shoulder fired hyper-velocity missiles a few years back, I have no idea what happened with them.

APFSDS would be "Armour Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot", but that is a tank munition and I know for a fact that you don't want to shoulder fire a tank round.:)

This was supposed to be javelen sized and used a delpleted uranium core. I believe the payload was ultimately pencil sized. lets say it was 5mm in diameter and 10cm shaft of uranium moving at Mach 7 well, doing some google math gives me

It's been a long time since I was a tanker, but IIRC, the actual dimensions of a long rod penetrator are roughly 3cm by 75cm. Speed is ~1500 m/s, not Mach7

Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.

Steve Jobs: No way dude! I'll never work with the military! You're harshing my mellow!Army: We'll tell everyone that Apple is insanely great, and that you personally are a genius.Steve Jobs: Well that's OK then. Hypersonic missiles are insanely great too!

Manned aircraft aren't the only things that move faster than the speed of sound. In fact, since the pilot is now the limiting factor in most aircraft designs, the Army may have more use than the Air Force for hypersonic simulations - for SAMs and Patriot-type interceptor missiles that will have a flight envelope that is largely unexplored since an unmanned machine can withstand g-forces that would cause a pilot to blackout or worse.

Aside from the kinds of missiles, anti-missiles and anti-anti-missile-missiles or whatever that other people have mentioned, the Army may be interested in other small hypersonic projectiles.
Like, for example, kinetic energy weapons designed to penetrate armor. Or railguns. Or... whatever.:)

How about some hypersonic sub-orbital artillery [globalsecurity.org] with your fries, Sir? Granted that's the navy version, but whatcha wanna bet that the Army could put a land based platform to good use?

This sounds like a killer system, but I don't follow the performance numbers.

The 1655 CPU cluster is expected to deliver 25 Tflops, while the Virginia Tech machine, with 1,100 CPU's (if I remember properly) is rated at 10 Tflops. What else is different? Are they using a different interconnect? Clever programmers to get closer to peak? Or is it something silly like a journalist switching between peak and measured performance, or between computers and CPU's (assuming dual G5 Xserves)? Or is the G5 Xserve really _that_ much faster than the G5 desktop measures VA Tech was benchmarked with? I _like_ that idea...

The 1655 CPU cluster is expected to deliver 25 Tflops, while the Virginia Tech machine, with 1,100 CPU's (if I remember properly) is rated at 10 Tflops. What else is different? Are they using a different interconnect?

Had you read the article you would have known that thr Army machine is connected using standard gigabit ehternet whereas the Big Mac used Infiniband.

"Had you read the article you would have known that thr Army machine is connected using standard gigabit ehternet whereas the Big Mac used Infiniband."

GigE is about 10x slower (for this type of networking, see http://www.infinicon.com/pdf/LSTCUG-2003-Final.pdf ) than Infiniband. That is, unless there's some sort of magic router involved, I don't see how GigE would make CPU's faster.

Perhaps they're measuring different applications, and the Army machine doesn't need much communications? Kinda an odd way to benchmark...

The linpack benchmark used for ranking the top500 isn't that bandwidth and latency sensitive. That's why you see lots of clusters ranking highly, even though they have low performance interconnects, in some cases only Gb ethernet.

Apparently the 25 TFlops figure is the peak performance, while the expected max performance in linpack will be about 15 TFlops. This sound reasonable compared to bigmac (something like 17 Tflops peak, 10 TFlops max IIRC), considering that this one has 1.5 times as many cpu:s.

"I blieve the 25 Tflop figure is a typo. I've read 15Tflop elsewhere... they're also using plain gigabit ethernet for interconnects, not Infiniband, supposedly because the applications they plan to run don't require a lot of I/O"

Now _this_ makes sense. I can easily believe that a different app could have very different performance characteristics, which could explain a 2x performance difference. That won't affect the Top 500 list too much, though, since it's based on standard benchmarks.

This press release [yahoo.com] from the contractor seems pretty adamant about claiming 25TF, asserting "second only to the Earth Simulator" which seems to exclude a simple numeric typo.

Both c|net [com.com] and Mac Rumors [macrumors.com] say 15, though, which is as you say much more plausible. Given the degree of confusion, I wouldn't be too sure about other details such as interconnects or price tags... or even number of nodes; perhaps 1566 is an initial confuguration, later growing signifigantly larger to account for the 25TF figure.

Virginia Tech's machine sustained 10280 GFlops and peaked at 17600 GFlops. The Army's new cluster has half again as many nodes, as Big Mac did, so they are predicting a 25000 GFlop peak. If the new cluster works on embarrassingly parallel problems, they might achieve 25 TFlops. If not-- perhaps 12-15 TFlops is a more realistic estimate.

Nearly every last adult male in Switzerland does compulsory military service and knows how to operate a SIG assault rifle, does he not? I'd say that's going a fair way towards being better at violence than your neighbor.

The swiss also have the great threat of "All your money belong to us".

Few large nations are going to invade switzerland. Even should they want to then most of the rest of the world would retaliate. So you do not really have to be better at apllying violence than them. The only time it might is in another world war.

Small nations that may wish to do so need the swiss to keep thier money safe.

Add in the idea that if they are invaded that everyone will fire a shot and go home and you have the best case for s

I guess about 90% of swiss males hate to do the army-service. You have to do training for 3 weeks every other year (schweizer: keine details.;-) ).
Anyway, almost every one of them has a Stgw 90 at home, no SIG or whatever you call it. It was developed by the swiss army.

I guess your definition of "solution" depends on your definition of "problem". If the solution to a violent world is "to be better at violence than your neighbours", I guess you don't consider war itself a problem, only the war you happen to lose. (I indeed consider any war a major violence problem itself, and specially not a solution for violence.)

I mean, did you read your own words? If every society applies your axiom, trying to be better at violence than their neighbours... how exactly does the solution to a violent world appear? You would think the world would engage in a global arms race (and eventually a global war, as strategigy give rise to tactics). Is this a solution for a violent world? I honestly think I don't get your point.

The nation of Canada has a great deal to be proud of, but your points border on the ridiculous.

Canada as always beaten the crap out of the US of A ( see your history book ladies of the US ).

"Canada" has been at war with the United States twice - once during the American Revolution and once during the War of 1812. On neither occasion was the United States fighting "Canada", because that nation was not yet founded. It was however fighting the British Army in His Majesty's colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. On both occasions the British Army repelled an American invasion of Canada. On the latter occasion the American army also repelled a British invasion of the western United States from Canada. Your statement is, to say the least, a little simplistic.

Whe have one of the biggest country ( in territory ) with one of the smallest army in number of unit in the world.

Canada is defended by the armed forces and nuclear arsenal of the United States (and, for that matter, the other NATO countries). It is therefore unsurprising that it has a small "army in number of unit".

Whe have the best nuclear reactor and MEDICAL nuclear program in the world but NO NUCLEAR FOR WEAPON program even do whe know how and can build in 30 minutes the best nuke in the world, whe CHOOSED not to.

Setting aside the easy jokes about limited grammatical technology, Canada has not constructed any nuclear weapons because nuclear attacks on Canada would trigger retaliation from the United States. It's not likely that Canada could design and construct a nuclear weapon in "30 minutes the best nuke in the world", but it's certainly clear that any modern industrialized nation could manufacture a nuclear weapon with comparatively little trouble, especially if a substantial nuclear facilities complex is already in place. It's not really obvious what this has to do with being better than anyone else.

Whe have -"NO"- Known enemy.

Well, according to this story reprinted from the National Post, Al-Qaeda has declared that Canada must be destroyed [rabble.ca], because it is part of Dar ul-Harb. I can understand the strong desire to want to pretend that everything's just fine, but it should be pointed out that only one side has to agree in order to have a war.

I'm a grunt in the USMC (former computer geek...who would have figured?)Anyways... I'm about to go *back* to Iraq in September.The high brass has some f*ed up priorities some times.... the army has $5.8mil to contract out *research* to some company for technology what.... 10-15 years away at the minimum?Meanwhile the Marine Corps is scraping nickles and dimes to get us basic equipment the army has had for most of a decade.Hell, when we go to the field to train, we often have to yell "bang! bang!" because we don't get enough (or any) blank rounds for training.Imagine if they took just ONE Osprey off the project..... maybe then I wouldn't have a hand-me-down-from-the-army m16a2 (does the army use them anymore?)

When I was over in Saudi, for Desert Storm, we had the original M-16's issued to us, with no forward assist. You had one shot and then a rather fragile baseball bat. We also had our.38 Special revolvers. I guess we could shoot ourselves if we were overrun. Gotta' love life in the Air Force Reserves.

$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.

This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)

Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.

$5.8m may be "peanuts" (and I am well aware of the fact).... but if it were that simple.... why don't I have bullets? Why is the kevlar helmet I wear to combat the same one marines wore twenty-five years ago?

It's a political playground much larger than I can try to imagine...I'm just asking the simple question of where our priorities are.

I think that the reason you don't have any good equipment is because the USMC and the USN blew their allowance on a wasted IT upgrade from EDS. You know, that 7 _BILLION_ dollar contract which has already triggered SEC investigations for fraud.

Want to bitch about not having bullets? Look to your own leadership and stop whining about how the Army is going to spend its budget.

Not only do the wealthy fund the programs with their taxes, they also use the least government services.

Er, no. Government is what keeps society civil. Who has the most to lose if civilization breaks down, the guy living hand-to-mouth, owning little other than the clothes on his back and other depreciating assets, or the guy whose has land, stocks and intellectual property, assets that are worth little to nothing without government's ability to defend his ownership of them?
Government might be keeping the poor guy alive but it is keeping the rich guy alive and rich.

The majority of rich people don't hoard their money. That idea is an untrue stereotype. The majority invest it, start new companies, hire more employees, expand their businesses, buy expensive cars, boats, homes, etc. and, in general, keep the economy moving.

Unlike the poor people, who, when given a tax break, hide the extra money in mattresses because they don't know what to do with it.

Okay, enough sarcasm.

The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.

Should the top 40% pay 95% of the taxes? The top 30%? The top 20%?

Yes -- you make the money, you pay the taxes on it. Should the top 40% pay 90% of their income above, say, $100,000 in taxes, like they did in the 30's and 40's? Doubtful. Should they pay more than they do now? Definitely.

The top 50% *may* pay 95% of the taxes (doubtful) in terms of the government's total tax intake. The top 50% are not paying anywhere *near* 95%, or even 50%, of their *income*. Remember, the tax system is a bracketed system, so if the tax rate for the lowest bracket gets reduced a couple percent, *everyone*, from Jane Welfare to Bill Gates, pays less in taxes on the income in that bracket. I realize that wealth naturally accretes in the hands of the few -- I'm a realist about economics -- but I don't think we need to help that process along any. Since money naturally trickes *up*, and economic health is determined by the movement of money, why the hell are we giving the tax breaks to the people who would get the money anyway? Keynesian economics requires none of the hand-waving you need to make Reaganomics seem sensible. Giving tax breaks to the rich to "stimulate the economy" is like pouring water into the ocean and waiting for it to flow to the mountains.

How much money do you need to live, anyway? $30,000 a year? $50,000 a year? $100,000 a year? There's a certain point at which you can purchase pretty much every basic thing you could ever need (food, clothes, and shelter) -- above that, it's gravy. You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs. Maybe the rich use less in government services -- that's mostly because they can afford to get theirs elsewhere. The more the poor are able to afford their own medical care and groceries, the less they have to rely on the government for that.

Try living within spitting distance of the poverty line, and *then* tell me that the rich deserve their tax breaks. How many plasma screen TVs and yachts do you need, anyway?

I have fond memories of yelling many a "bang! bang!" and (my personal favorite) "budda budda jam!" during training exercises.

I was active duty USMC from 1992 through 1998 (aptly dubbed "Clinton's Corps"). It's good to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whether you have a Republican globalist in the White House or a Democrat globalist ruling the roost, the people who need it most still get the short end of the stick when it comes to military spending. In the end, the D.C. suits in charge are all globalists with the common goal of the oligarchy in mind.

We had practically no green money (USMC money) for things like training and education, but blue money (US Navy money for the aviation side of the house) seemed to come out of the friggin woodwork. I couldn't get a new three ring binder without filling out two forms (in triplicate!) and a two week wait for the purchase to be approved, but one avionics jockey with a few too many beers in him from the night before drops a $45K helicopter battery on the tarmac and POOF!! a new battery practically materializes out of nowhere with no paperwork and no questions asked.

The Marines are well known for doing the best job with the worst equipment and no preparation. Keep up the good work, and watch your ass in Iraq.

that croquer [croquer.free.fr] was talking about in April? Translation:

(Translation:

2004-04-07

- Reasons of the G5 delay

(...) The new G5s are not yet announced and available because a customer is buying the entire output: U.S. governmental agencies have decided that from June 2005, no sensible data will hosted on Windows machines any more. Too many security holes and risks. They ordered 80,000 G5 xServe and Powermacs from Apple.

2004-04-08 - G5 delay (continued)

Around 70 U9 (cf. below) have been ordered by large goverment agencies, like
NSA... About ten institutional laboratories already received the supercomputer, equipped with 1024 G5 processors @ 2.6 GHz. That already makes
over 10,000 G5, a major part of IBM's
production d'IBM => shortage.

The U9 project will officially be announced next fall in a version equipped with PPC975 @ 3 GHz, available to the wealthy (about 3
M$ per unit).)

For render farms and low interconnect requirements, blades are really popular because of manageablity and density (though I am curious about the manageability of Xserves beyond OS management, i.e. service processor presence/capabilities).

As to the comment about no 'mac' blades, it is true, but if you are a big fan of power architecture, IBM has announced JS-20, a power based blade, which has the 970 (same as G5), but only at 1.6 GHz (ironically enough, IBM doesn't seem to sell anything at the clock speeds Apple gets to sell at, and they are all IBM's chips...).

The cost of blade solutions with myrinet or infiniband solutions is significant. Otherwise, most chassis' I see communicate externally through an oversubscribed ethernet switch. Ethernet is inherently sub-optimal, but oversubscribed ethernet is particularly troublesome for some of the fine-grained parallel applications (embarrasingly parrallel applications, of course, don't care, and rendering is one such application).

Add to this a lack of expansion capability (i.e. IBM blades can take one daughterboard, so there is not any possibility of, say, having a fibre channel *and* myrinet adapter in a blade server.

The only thing I'm aware of with respect to high-performance interconnect solution for blade servers available today is to get IBM blades with Myrinet daughter boards and an optical passthrough module. Ultimately, it can really reduce cabling for things like ethernet, kvm, etc etc, but those myrinet cables are still going to be a tad unwieldy (80+ wires to the cabinet, even if they are fiber cables).

I actually want to see a solution that would aggregate, say, 1X infiniband to each blade into 4 4X connectors, no oversubscription and much sturdier and fewer cables.

As the price of processing power keeps dropping these clusters are getting closer to the magical 100Tflop mark, which is what Ray Kurzweil and others speculate is required to run a human-level AI . Maybe we should start worrying about the computing projects that military isn't announcing.

Is this really a supercomputer? Sounds more like a... supercluster to me.

At what point does linking together a bunch of off-the-shelf fully-self-contained PCs become a supercomputer? If doing so is the case, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to link together whitebox machines, much as datacenters (the type that rent servers) tend to use whitebox servers rather than rackmount boxes?

I just feel like the term "supercomputer" is being sullied by so-called supercomputers that are nothing more than a simple cluster. Of course, I'm probably a moron, as I said earlier.

when they can act as one system they become a cluster. when ur compute task can run on it as on single system u can call it a supercomputer.these divisions are quite arbitrary, of course.c http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/multipro cessing

white boxes aren't any cheaper - they take up expensive server room space. and with the current technology white boxes require dramatically more complicated cabling and hence their setup is more expensive (labor intesive), maintenance as well.

I've asked this question before and been modded as troll, but I'm serious: Is Apple the new Sun? It seems that while Apple doesn't have the broad product line that Sun does on the high-end server market, they are nonetheless making inroads into that very market. Further, Apple is sleek and sexy and has a lot of goodwill going for it, whereas Sun mostly brings out ambivalence.

I'm not saying they are direct competitors, but they are competitors in at least some respects. And it seems that Apple is profiting from sales of its products whereas Sun's biggest revenue inflow recently has been its $1b settlement with Microsoft, not from its product lines.

The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.

I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).

There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.

As the military continues to become more high-tech it takes a greater and greater level of techinical skills to operate, especially at command centers. At some point it is going to become difficult to recuit those people (simply put, if 15% of the population has - or is capable of - the technical skills and the military needs 50% of it's troop to have them they must come from someplace).

I do not think it is in the next few years. But since sometime in the 90's (can't really specify a single point in time) it has been a possibility. Any large theater we may have to get invovled in may require this.

Though this has little to do with the current Iraq war and more to do with the shift the military has been taking.

But yes, as to what the vast majority of people refer to the "upcoming draft", it is what a few democrats have discussed as a talking point and a protest against the war. Others have picked up on it and it has changed to "Bush wants a draft". The military still turns down a certain percentage of the volunteers it recieves as they consider themselfs over staffed - especially in the realm of grunts as they need educated technical skills (and grunts are what armchair or retired generals are moaning about not having enough of). There will be no general draft until that is no longer true.

Vector processing. SSE for Intel and AMD, AltiVec for the G5, and 3DNow for AMD all are instruction sets that allow one to manipulate vectors of 4 floats or 2 doubles (or other assortments) as though they are one operand.

One thing to note is that vector processing doesn't help the G5 on the linpack benchmark (what the top 500 list uses). Altivec only helps single precision calculations. Good for games and graphics, but not desirable for many scientific calculations.

It's the fact that the G5 can dispatch two floating point operations per cycle (like the Athlon's fpu) and that it has a fused multiply/add instruction that can be done in 1 cycle. This effectively gives it the ability to do 4 flops/cycle.